


together like waves

by sugartweeze



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Adventure, Boys Being Boys, First Kiss, Fishing, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 07:24:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4995523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugartweeze/pseuds/sugartweeze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killua does not dream. Instead, he stretches as soon as he gets up, sometimes even before dawn, his pupils wide and dark. The arrhythmic pop and crack of his well-trained joints, that’s what he’s used to. Now he has gotten used to the rush and sigh of Gon’s sleeping breath in the background--an earthy, puppyish sound.</p><p>(Set during their month on Whale Island, the happiest place.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	together like waves

The Whale Island he created in his mind is nothing compared to its realness. Killua imagined a half-paradise, trees so heavy with fruit the boughs bent down to kiss the grass, rolling hills veined with shallow creeks and dusky flower buds, all the sunshine he could ever want. His mind filled with countryside images gleaned from billboards, airship magazine pictorials saturated with gloss, and after a while his thoughts bent cynical because what hillsides could be that green? And wildflowers and waterfalls probably weren’t so special. Sometimes Killua remembered people, when Gon would say the name of some neighbor or ship’s captain in one of his stories, and Killua conveniently prescribed them the same-face of people he remembered from illustrations in his old books--everyone’s features a bit nice, quaint, mostly flat.

But those are Gon’s eyes staring out of Mito-san’s face, just a different color, round and stubborn as river rocks in the pretty softness of her sun-kissed face. From the hilltop the island that unfurled beneath his feet was nothing at all like he’d thought. It was far more.

 

Acrid wind blows everywhere, rich with a stinging, fish-salt smell. Swamp trees bend like broken limbs, twisting in unexpected patterns. It rained without preamble, leaving brown and silver puddles in the road like so many tarnished mirrors. It could be lonely. It isn’t lonely at all.

The things that normally make Killua feel big here, they don’t work. Gon doesn’t like it when he scares the townsfolk with his murder talk and blown out eyes (Killua realizes he doesn’t really like it either). He doesn’t kill anyone, though he does rough up a trio of village thugs when he takes his skateboard to the toy shop to get a truck fixed and ends up ambushed. No one finds out because he hides the bodies, but still, Killua does not enjoy it, not even a little bit. He stays surly for the rest of the day, until Gon shows him the kittens that live under the butcher’s porch.

(“This one’s like Killua!” Gon said, holding up the palest and smallest of them. The crawlspace is musty, milk-smelling. The kitten struggles in Gon’s palm, a blind fuzzy worm of a thing, and Killua wants to protest but he grins instead. Later, in the bath, Gon shows him a tiny pattern of scabs on his thumb. Weak and new as it was, it could still draw blood.)

 

The first time Gon shows you his room, too clean and soundless to have been lived-in even when he lived here. They both fly to the window, Gon kneeling on the carpet, disturbing Mito’s vacuum tracks. He folds his arms on the casement and rests his dreamy chin in his palm. The path that carves up the hill looks narrow and deep, a slow, soft-growing curve easing into the horizon.

“Sorry, Killua.” His voice is soft, and Killua knows he’s already at least partly somewhere else, climbing mountains or trees to touch a different sky. “It’s small here. I know it’s not a whole mountain. I mean, it’s not even as nice as our Arena rooms. Not nearly. Nothing like where you came from.”

Killua laughs without malice, just a little crookedly. “Gon, that’s a good thing.” He pauses. “Believe me, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

 

On Whale Island, Killua gets used to things. He gets sunburn. He eats melon and honeycomb fresh from the hive. He springs a trap and sets a snare, he kills a bird with a stone. Mito-san washes his hair in the kitchen, his throat bare above the sink, and her hands smell like fish and paprika and nothing at like his mother’s lavender oil or the weird ultraviolet smell of her sensor. A gob of smoked meat sticks between his teeth and he picks it out with a thorn and not a claw. He gets used to washing his hands with river water. Gon’s clothes smell like moss, or maybe it’s just Gon. Earth settles blackly in Killua’s nail beds. At the end of every day Gon’s crafty fingers untangle burrs and seedpods from Killua’s hair, pulling them free. Killua sharpens a stick against a rock, listening closely to the rasp before it snaps. Gon pulls open a cabinet drawer in Mito’s room, revealing a jawbone knife in a tan leather sheath. Maybe it was his dad’s? Maybe. 

They go to the quay sometimes, watching the ships go in and out of port, calling out to sailors or trying to catch the cats. They dodge around barrels of salted cod, hurtling over heavy nets of pink shrimp. There’s flying fish too, hanging from skeins of rope with their wings outstretched and pinned open on little hooks. Gon fell once and landed in a pile of fish guts, and Killua laughed about it for days. Gon yelled and his face burned and the fish scales glittered in his hair like mermaid tears or bits of broken jewels, and it just made Killua laugh harder.

They eat berries until their tongues turn bright orange and stain their teeth yellow. They swim in a pool so dark blue in the middle it’s nearly black--no races, only lazy frog crawls, water sluicing cleanly against Killua’s skin, tiny silver fish darting around his ankles. He flicks ladybugs off his socks. Killua watches Gon lie flat on the creek bed, scratching his belly idly, his face twitching in the depths of sleep. Killua does not dream. Instead, he stretches as soon as he gets up, sometimes even before dawn, his pupils wide and dark. The arrhythmic pop and crack of his well-trained joints, that’s what he’s used to. Now he has gotten used to the rush and sigh of Gon’s sleeping breath in the background--an earthy, puppyish sound.

They get stomachaches from eating a kind of weird, flappy mushroom Gon swore was good, and Mito throws a fit that has the whole house trembling, but it is Gon’s great-grandmother who comes with the soup and flat brown bread. There are always soft shadows in the room where the grandmother sits, knitting Gon a new pair of socks, a square of sunlight tucked in her lap. Killua has never known a creature like her before, made of so many kindnesses. There was never a place for grandmothers in the Zoldyck mansion, and Grandpa only ever prowled his dynasty’s halls alone. Her quiet contentment unnerves him at first, but he continues to watch her hands, writing letters, brewing tea, plucking out the feathers of a chicken in sheaves. If it weren’t for her, Gon would not even be alive, would he? Mito had seen Ging leave, but the grandmother had seen even Mito’s parents climb their trees and catch their fish before they were swallowed by the waves. The realization unsettles him. This woman too, then, knows something of death.

 

Killua is content to think on nobody, he just wants to swing in the trees and spear fish with his bare hands, but Gon can only ever think of everyone else. “Hey hey, doesn’t this flower remind you of Canary?” and “Ah, I bet Zushi is challenging a Floor Master right about now, I wish we could see it.” Killua doesn’t mind so much, he hasn’t burned that selfish way for a long time. Still, he likes to interrupt Gon’s musings about the multitude with a pull on his nose and a sour smile. He likes when Gon’s brows come down and he squawks, then they kick each other, but he likes even more when Gon’s eyes crinkle up, all sheepish corners, “Sorry, Killua, was I rambling?” His hands come up, apologetic, perfect, and Killua can feel the glow even from a distance.

(Gon writes letters, blithe and unimportant, sticks them in between his books and forgets to post them. Leorio gets the seed packet for fire violets, because they’re pretty, and the roots make a good tea for chills. Kurapika is tough, but eventually he picks up a rock broken open, the size of a young foxbear skull. Inside is a nest of sparkling bloody teeth, quartz crystals grown into crimson shards. Gon’s tokens of scattered love, because giving is all he can do.)

They meditate in the highest tree tops and under waterfalls, practicing Ten. Gon’s lungs fill with warm island air, his translucent aura a thin, smudging halo that rises and falls with his exhales. Killua knows the shape of his presence better than a footprint. He tries, once, to read the destiny etched into Gon’s fisherman’s palms, a book propped open in front of him, his pulse a quick, excited beat beneath Killua’s fingers. “Go on, then, tell me! Killua!” Wasp stings collect on Killua’s skin in a blistering red constellation of pain. At dawn they scale the east cliffs to steal eggs from the nests of eagles, eagles with wings as wide as Killua is tall, eagles with bronze dark feathers that catch the rays of the rising sun on their wingtips, making them look like falling angels catching fire. They sit on the precipice, sucking out the gold egg yolk raw while wisps of cloud curled around their ankles, knees ragged, near-broken from the climb. In the distance, the sun and the sea stretch on to forever. Killua does not dream.

 

It rains. It rains and the wetlands flood up to their roots, the Lord of the Lake swims all the way to edge of town, almost into the sea. It rains and once they are caught in it and have to huddle beneath the gnarled roots of a twisted tree, huddled up in the dirt together like wild things, and Killua thinks about the steady warmth of Gon’s skin, the grass-green smell of him. Mud seeps into bottom of his shorts and he could take a fistful of it, if he wanted, and smash it into Gon’s forehead, and Gon would holler and rub handfuls of mud into Killua’s hair; they would tussle and shout and tumble together like animals in the dirt. But suddenly the idea of touching Gon seems unwise, in an unintentionally dangerous way Killua cannot understand because it’s not like he will die if he does touch him, and danger has always meant death for him. But any risk aversion has long since been needled into his skin, so he does nothing. They sit there, crouched in the misty silver darkness only a rainstorm can bring, breathing together, separate parts of one whole, like clouds and rain, water and earth. They stay there together long after the rain stops.

They do not hold hands. They fall into each other like trees. It is natural as breathing, somehow. How could it not be? He’s just another person in Killua’s hands, nothing at all like those dolls he used to make with his sister, little people made of twigs and grass and leaves strung together with twine. Gon is a person, sweating and compact and full of bones. He tastes like a campfire smells.

(Killua grows into his mouth like a flame. Killua is a cloud of mouths, Killua is a shadow at dawn, Killua is a monster. Killua is his friend.)

Their kiss could not be sweet, at first, just warm and dry; Killua takes a tiny bite and puts his hands on him, but they only ever kiss, roll and tremble and kiss again, again. Eyes closed, then open wide. Killua lays on top of him and their sweat runs together, but they do not move, together as if they were one seamlessness, living in the same melt. Killua gasps just to feel Gon contract beneath him, and idly smushes his mouth against Gon’s hairline or his chin in a parody of melodrama. But eventually they lapse into the same stillness, and Killua slowly sits upright, retreating like a shadow at noon.

 

Mito takes Gon (Gon takes Killua) to see a cow in labor, swollen with time. It is new and startling, and Killua is almost frightened. But there is a rightness to the mother and her gangly wet calf, her big soft cow eyes, her big slick cow tongue. The milk is good and the smell of warmed straw and mildew is so new to him, so right. That night Killua eats warm bread with butter before sleeping, Mito and Gon telling stories in the kitchen, and thinks that no other place in the world could be so right. Whale Island is too small even for crossroads, and the houses in the valley stand on stilts or on giant steps of clever stone to keep out of the sea. They have made stability where they would otherwise topple into nothing. Killua never wants to leave.

But Gon can’t stay, and Killua follows Gon. They settle back down into the equilibrium of before.

 

In their hammocks below deck nothing is quiet or still. It smells like saltwater and grog, the ship’s timbers are gummy with tar and old screams. Killua grimaces and wipes soot off his face. He changes his clothes too often and scowls at all the wings, searching vainly for the broad stretch of Milluki’s hawk. He never dreams. He wants to kiss Gon again, to make the world change fast enough. He wants his purpose to spread itself out in front of him like a carpet or a hangman’s rope, an easy scar. He is getting sick of all the fog, and all the ship’s apples and pears are mealy and sour in his mouth. The sea salt burns the back of his throat and makes him say mean things. Jeez, Gon, don't you know _anything_?

(When Gon dreams, the moon comes to him in many forms. It hits him with its hammer-fist. Its spins a deck of playing cards. It gives him a kiss. It opens his throat with its claws.)

But by the time they reach the broken shoreline of Yorkshin and it’s autumn promise of new adventure, things are all right. Killua likes the clouds again, and all the screaming birds. They watch the breaking waves and fiery sunsets, leaving little fingerprints in the pitch. They spend hours up in the rigging like storybook pirates. Laughing together all the while.

(But neither of them forget.)

**Author's Note:**

> I know there's eight million different fics that transform Whale Island into a set piece out of a Studio Ghibli film and also involve Killua falling in love with Gon, and I love every single one of them. So this is my contribution to the pile! Title comes from Simple Life by The Weepies. 
> 
> I haven't written a complete fanfic in more than five years. Gosh, I'm so rusty.


End file.
